As more and more sales happen online, a great opportunity for data gathering has emerged in the vacation rental space. Through a combination of web scraping and direct integrations, companies are able to recreate and predict markets with surprising accuracy.
Data analytics will never completely replace good judgement and contextual thinking, but it provides an opportunity for amazing insights. Data can help a revenue management strategy, it can benchmark performance, it can identify investment opportunities, and it can help answer the tough questions.
There are several data providers in the short-term rental industry that all provide their own take on data to address some difficult vacation rental data problems. Below we dive into each one before providing a side-by-side comparison to help you make the best decision for your portfolio.
The Players …
AirDNA is the oldest data aggregator in the space and has established itself as the industry standard when it comes to market data. Since they’ve been around awhile, they’re able to offer over 25 different metrics all focused on helping property managers better understand their market. Recently, they’ve even started to expand their forward-looking data offerings.
One point of contention many property managers have is that AirDNA uses scraped data as opposed to data only harvested from direct PMS integrations. While this does mean there’s room for error, AirDNA has stated that after using machine learning their data is 93% accurate … which is amazing. Moreover, it means they can serve any market with extensive insights. If they relied only on customers and direct integrations their data would be much more limited, much less robust, and there would be far fewer markets available.
While AirDNA rarely provides super granular data (at least in its MarketMinder product, the most common product) it is available as an enterprise solution. AirDNA is clearly focused on market data and not designed to manage one’s own portfolio which is perfect if a company has a PMS that has good reporting features.
Key Data is everything AirDNA is not and offers a real juxtaposition for data providers in the vacation rental space.
Key Data uses only real-time data from clients’ integrated property management systems. It completely takes the guesswork out of the equation. Moreover, because they pull reservation data they are able to offer great forward-looking data on availability, pricing, and performance metrics. Key Data also has a huge focus on benchmarking a company’s own portfolio and gracefully rolls up portfolio metrics into the same dashboard.
Key Data’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Their market offerings are somewhat limited and often their data doesn’t represent a big enough market share to be robust in new and emerging markets. Key Data is a great fit if it is available in your area with significant market share and/or a company’s current PMS doesn’t have great reporting features.
Transparent aims to take all the ambiguity out of vacation rental market data. They take all the various data sources and try to remove the noise from the signal, distill the wealth of available data down to useable insights.
Transparent offers great metrics on both forward-looking and historical performance. Beyond market supply and demand, Transparent also groups properties by operator. Many think this feature is superficial but it is super powerful when combined with other data points. For one, Transparent is the only platform that can estimate market share by operator so a company can know their competition, pricing power, and opportunities for growth.
Another huge complaint from property managers is that many of the vacation rentals aren’t professionally operated. Essentially, this creates noise and drives down market prices as small operators don’t use sophisticated strategies or helpful tools. Additionally, because of this, professional operators think they should be well outperforming the market and don’t want their pricing competitive set to include all listings. Transparent is the only platform that allows these market metrics to be filtered by operator. Now the data can be limited to professional operators for performance benchmarking and competitive intelligence for rate setting.
Transparent is a great option if there is a huge division between professional and casual operators in the market, market share and growth opportunities by market are extremely important, or comparative benchmarking is extremely important to investors. Transparent is a great fit for start-up like, venture capital backed, or the overachieving portfolio.
AllTheRooms offers all the standard historical and forward-looking data. Where they set themselves apart is with some of their unique dashboard insights.
AllTheRooms generates a Vacation Rental Score every month. This score compares metrics like revenue, ADR, and occupancy from a company’s listing and the market and simplifies performance into a single grade. For property managers that may feel overwhelmed or that want an easy to understand third party metric to communicate to owner’s or investors AllTheRooms offers the perfect solution.
Click2Flip announced its shutdown on 11/19/2020 and plans to cease operations by 12/31/2020.
Click2Flip is completely different from the other products in this post. Click2Flip is focused on investment data. As such, it pulls in estimated home values, financing options, and estimates potential cashflow to help investors make better decisions. A lot of their features are powered by other companies like AirDNA, Zillow, and Google. Click2Flip is great for investors but does little to monitor or aid ongoing operational excellence.
Who Should Get What?
A lot of this decision comes down to market and price. Some markets are better served by certain products more so than others. Additionally, how comparatively good the platform is and how much it costs are major considerations when contracting a data provider. However, all things being equal, we can generally advise some best-fits.
For those looking to benchmark their performance against the market and don’t have that functionality in their PMS currently, then Key Data is the way to go. The one drawback is that it may not be available in your market. Key Data is also a great option for those who are in a popular market and want to avoid some of the pitfalls with scraped data.
For those conducting case studies, trying to prove value to investors/owners, or that want to limit their comp set to professional operators, Transparent is a great option. It allows you to segment a market like no other and may even be great for evaluating markets to invest in based on professional saturation.
Click2Flip is purely an investor play. Its all about buying properties that are going to make great short-term rentals. Click2Flip is great for those looking to quickly expand and minimize their risk in doing so.
AllTheRooms keeps it simple. Its a great data tool for a single property owner, small portfolios, or those looking to run their business with minimum time, effort, and investment. Their performance score allows anyone to benchmark against the market and make moves to improve their performance.
AirDNA is sort of the catch-all. They have great availability, competitive pricing, and a slew of features. While they may not simplify it as much as AllTheRooms, have investor info on par with Click2Flip, use PMS data like Key Data, or track operators like Transparent, AirDNA has a little bit of everything. They are constantly adding new data (like more forward-looking metrics) and features (like market pricing suggestions). AirDNA is always a great place to start unless/until there is a more specialized data niche you need to seek out from another provider. AirDNA may just be the best bang for the buck.
RevPARTY Can Help!
If you need more data or don’t know what to do with the data you have RevPARTY can help. We’ve worked with leaders in the industry to provide vacation rental partner discounts. From a data deep dive to owner dashboards and reports, we can walk you through every step of the process to gain more actionable insights, implement those insights, and communicate them effectively to your team.
RevPARTY can help your company communicate to more people that you’re making more money.
